WASHINGTON POST DON’T SCAPEGOAT RICE ROBERT KAGAN
… Republicans also need to do their part to show that the partisan sniping of the recent campaign season is over and that they know it is time to get serious again. One place to start would be to back off their promises to oppose the nomination of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice as secretary of state. … Any further investigations ought to focus on why the attack came as such a surprise… There is also a larger question: whether the administration’s “light footprint” in Libya after the fall of Moammar Gaddafi was too light. These are issues that ought to concern the secretaries of state and defense, the CIA director and others responsible for our diplomats’ security as well as our broader foreign policy doctrine.
NEW YORK TIMES THE HIGH COST OF FREE OFFICE SNACKS EZEKIEL EMANUEL
Still, there must be some alternative to those cookies and potato chips. The question is: what? A study published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, which followed more than 120,000 health professionals, found that daily servings of yogurt, nuts and fruit have the greatest capacity to help people lose weight. Conversely, an additional serving of potato chips every day led to a 1.69-pound weight increase over four years. Based on this data — and the long-understood need to avoid added sugar and saturated fats — free snack bars should be overflowing with yogurts, pistachios, pecans, walnuts, almonds and a wide variety of fresh fruits. As for packaged snacks, how about dried seaweed — just 30 calories, 50 milligrams of salt and no sugar.
NEW YORK TIMESTHE LIBERAL GLOATROSS DOUTHAT
…Whatever role government plays in prosperity, transfer payments are not a sufficient foundation for middle-class success. It’s not a coincidence that the economic era that many liberals pine for — the great, egalitarian post-World War II boom — was an era that social conservatives remember fondly as well: a time of leaping church attendance, rising marriage rates and birthrates, and widespread civic renewal and engagement. No such renewal seems to be on the horizon. That isn’t a judgment on the Obama White House, necessarily. But it is a judgment on a certain kind of blithe liberal optimism, and the confidence with which many Democrats assume their newly emerged majority is a sign of progress rather than decline.
WASHINGTON POST RESTORING HOPE AT HOME EJ DIONNE JRFor much of the last decade, Americans of very different stripes have been haunted by the fear that our country is in decline. If Obama is looking for a single, unifying objective, it should be to make sure that by the time he leaves office, the vast majority of Americans will have abandoned their declinist fears. He should want conservatives and Republicans, no less than liberals and Democrats, to perceive their nation as on the move again. … Obama needs an unapologetically large and unified program of economic uplift, including policies on taxes, education, training and infrastructure investment. He should also look to how new approaches to innovation, unionization, immigration, trade, research and science can contribute to both growth and justice.
Jane Timm